Matt Weinstock : research residency in March

Matt Weinstock is in research residency from 10 to 21 March 2025.

Matt Weinstock is a writer and researcher based in New York City. His essays, profiles, and interviews have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Playbill, and Screen Slate. His work has been supported by the Library of Congress, the Grolier Club, and the St. Louis Literary Award program.

At the moment he is at work on an experimental biography of Burr Tillstrom, an American puppeteer who was the central creative force behind “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” a beloved television program that aired nationally from 1949 to 1957. The show was a darling of both the cultural cognoscenti (Edward Albee and Tallulah Bankhead were among its devotees) and the innocent (children used to kiss their television screens every night mid-broadcast). Although today one might say that Tillstrom was “closeted,” surviving episodes of his show reveal an irrepressible gay sensibility, one that shaped a generation of young queer artists. “When Ollie put his head on top of Kukla’s at the end of the show, I saw male-male love for the first time,” the novelist James McCourt has said.

In an effort to resurrect Tillstrom’s life and work, Weinstock has studied Tillstrom’s papers at the Chicago History Museum; watched hundreds of kinescopes of “Kukla, Fran and Ollie”; and interviewed dozens of his friends, colleagues, and admirers. While in residence at the Pôle International de la Marionnette – Jacques Félix from 10 to 21 March 2025, he will plumb the personal and professional archives of Yves Joly, a Normandy-born puppeteer whose work radicalized Tillstrom and inspired his 1964 masterpiece, the “Berlin Wall” hand ballet. During his residency, Weinstock hopes to learn about Joly’s lifelong quest for simplicity, the evolution of his “les mains seules” technique, and his cross-lingual friendship with Tillstrom.